The present invention relates to a sealed-type optical information recording medium.
It is required that an adhesive agent for sealing a disk-type information recording medium have no adverse effects on the recording materials for the medium to be sealed, for instance, by a by-product formed during the hardening of the adhesive agent, and the adhesive agent not contain a solvent. For such a purpose, an epoxy adhesive agent is usually employed. However, an epoxy adhesive agent has the shortcomings that when a plastic substrate is employed, the adhesive agent deforms the substrate upon heat application for the hardening of the adhesive agent, and a long time is required for the hardening. Recently, a room-temperature-hardening type epoxy adhesive agent is proposed, which becomes hard at room temperature. However, it also has the shortcoming that a long time is required for the hardening.
Under such circumstances, an ultra-violet-ray hardening type adhesive agent attracts attention. This adhesive agent appears promising because it neither produces any adverse by-products during the hardening nor contains any solvent therein. In the case of this adhesive agent, the hardening is carried out by a radical polymerization reaction and the radicals present in the adhesive agent are consumed by the oxygen contained in the air, so that it has the shortcoming that a long time is required for the hardening of the surface when applied. In particular, when this adhesive agent is used in an air-sandwich-type sealed disk, the surface of the applied adhesive agent in the sealed inner portion does not become hard enough so that unreacted monomer components evaporate from the sealed inner portion, by which the recording layer is adversely affected. As a countermeasure for this problem, it is proposed to eliminate oxygen from the atmosphere for the hardening process. Specifically, a method of hardening the adhesive agent in an atmosphere of nitrogen is proposed. However, this method is not necessarily suitable for mass production, because a large-scale facility is required.
In a sealed type information recording medium including a recording layer at an adhesion portion, it is known that the adhesion strength between the recording material and the substrate is not so strong that there is the risk that the recording layer eventually peels off the substrate surface.
Further, a variety of organic dyes have been developed as the recording material. Some of them allow easy formation of a recording layer, for example, by coating a dye dissolved in a solvent. This is one of the advantages of the organic dyes over other materials. When an organic dye is dissolved in a solvent and the solution is coated on a substrate, spin coating is most suitable for accurate film formation coating. The spin coating, however, has the shortcoming that the masking for not forming a recording layer in the adhesion portion is extremely difficult. Therefore, if a recording layer in the adhesion portion is removed prior to the coating of an adhesive agent, it is possible to secure sufficient adhesion strength between the recording layer and the substrate. In this case, dust is formed in the course of the removing of the recording layer, by which a defective recording medium is apt to be produced.